Full Name
Ryan Watkins
Position
Professor
Institution
George Washington University
Bio
Ryan Watkins, PhD, is a Professor at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. He is the program director of the Educational Technology Leadership (MA) program, faculty lead of the interdisciplinary Human-Technology Collaboration (PhD) concentration (research lab), and Director of Education for the GWU Trustworthy AI initiative.

Dr. Watkins co-leads the GW Coders, where he routinely shares innovative uses of Python, PHP, and Javascript. He developed and maintains the social-sharing platform We Share Science, a place for scientists to share video abstracts about their research, and SciencePods, an automated tool for researchers to create podcasts. He co-developed Code2Learn as a clearinghouse for interdisciplinary coding tutorials, and recently developed the open source Python package PreprintScout.

As co-host of Parsing Science (2017-2021), a podcast where leading scientist from around the work share the stories behind their research, Dr. Watkins (along with Doug Leigh from Pepperdine University) explored science through many disciplinary lenses.

Some of his most recent publication include Teaching and Learning with Jupyter (free gitbook), The Art of Knowledge Exchange (World Bank, 2014), available for free online, and A Guide to Assessing Needs: Essential Tools for Collecting Information, Making Decisions, and Achieving Development Results (World Bank, 2012), also available in print and free online. In 2013, A Guide to Assessing Needs was the most read online book available through the World Bank, with more than 57,000 reads.

He is also an author of the world’s top-selling text on e-learning (with more than 150,000 copies in press and in its 4th edition), the E-learning Companion: A Learner’s Guide to Online Success (Houghton Mifflin, 2005, 2007; Cengage 2010, 2013), along with other books including the Handbook for Improving Performance in the Workplace – Volume 2 (Pfieffer/Wiley, 2010), Performance By Design: The systematic selection, design, and development of performance technologies (HRD Press, 2006), and 75 E-learning Activities: Making online courses interactive (Pfieffer, 2005).

Pre-COVID, Dr. Watkins was an active member and past Board Member of the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI), a member and TIG lead in the American Evaluation Association (AEA), and was a vice president of the Inter-American Distance Education Consortium (CREAD). In 2005, Dr. Watkins was a visiting scientist with the National Science Foundation (IPA), and he routinely consults on projects with the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank on applying needs assessment, evaluation, instructional design, and performance improvement to international assistance programs (including work in Kenya, Tunisia, China, Mexico, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Laos PRD). Dr. Watkins has also facilitated monitoring and evaluation workshops for the International Program for Development Evaluation Training (in Switzerland and China).